Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

by Olga Tokarczuk

And then it occurred to me that in a way Big Foot’s death might be a good thing. It had freed him from the mess that was his life. And it had freed other living Creatures from him.

What a joy it is in life when you happen to have a clean, warm kitchen. It has never happened to me. I have never been good at keeping order around me. Too bad—I’m reconciled to it by now.

With age, many men come down with testosterone autism, the symptoms of which are a gradual decline in social intelligence and capacity for interpersonal communication, as well as a reduced ability to formulate thoughts. The Person beset by this Ailment becomes taciturn and appears to be lost in contemplation. He develops an interest in various Tools and machinery, and he’s drawn to the Second World War and the biographies of famous people, mainly politicians and villains. His capacity to read novels almost entirely vanishes;

Sometimes, when a Person feels Anger, everything seems simple and obvious. Anger puts things in order and shows you the world in a nutshell; Anger restores the gift of Clarity of Vision, which it’s hard to attain in any other state.

I find this division of people into three groups—skiers, allergy sufferers and drivers—very convincing. It is a good, straightforward typology.

She looked like a survivor from Pompeii—as if she were entirely coated in ash.

In a way, people like her, those who wield a pen, can be dangerous. At once a suspicion of fakery springs to mind—that such a Person is not him- or herself, but an eye that’s constantly watching, and whatever it sees it changes into sentences; in the process it strips reality of its most essential quality—its inexpressibility.

But the truth is that anyone who feels Anger, and does not take action, merely spreads the infection. So says our Blake.

The Sun flees over there, once it has seen enough of these atrocities.

I have always believed that Astrology should be learned through practice. It is solid knowledge, to a large extent empirical and just as scientific as psychology, let’s say.

One will soon notice that similar astrological patterns describe similar incidents. That’s when one’s initiation occurs—oh yes, order does exist, and it is within reach.

One must keep one’s eyes and ears open, one must know how to match up the facts, see similarity where others see total difference, remember that certain events occur at various levels or, to put it another way, many incidents are aspects of the same, single occurrence. And that the world is a great big net, it is a whole, where no single thing exists separately; every scrap of the world, every last tiny piece, is bound up with the rest by a complex Cosmos of correspondences, hard for the ordinary mind to penetrate. That is how it works. Like a Japanese car.

Dizzy, who’s prone to effusive digressions on the topic of Blake’s bizarre symbolism, has never shared my passion for Astrology. That’s because he was born too late. His generation has Pluto in Libra, which somewhat weakens their vigilance.

I grew up in a beautiful era, now sadly in the past.

Nowadays no one still has the courage to think up anything new. All they ever talk about, round the clock, is how things already are, they just keep rolling out the same old ideas.

Prisons are built with stones of Law, Brothels with bricks of Religion.

all the poems ever written seemed to me unnecessarily complicated and unclear. I couldn’t understand why these revelations weren’t recorded properly—in prose.

the poems ever written seemed to me unnecessarily complicated and unclear. I couldn’t understand why these revelations weren’t recorded properly—in prose.

“It’s not as strange as it sounds,” I continued. “Animals are strong and wise. We don’t realize how clever they are. There was a time when Animals were tried in court. Some were even convicted.” “What are you saying? What are you saying?” he gibbered vacantly. “I once read about some Rats that were sued for causing a lot of damage, but the case was deferred because they never showed up for the hearings. Finally the court appointed them a defense lawyer.”

That’s what I dislike most of all in people—cold irony. It’s a very cowardly attitude to mock or belittle everything, never be committed to anything, not feel tied to anything.

“You’ll say it’s just one Boar,” I continued. “But what about the deluge of butchered meat that falls on our cities day by day like never-ending, apocalyptic rain? This rain heralds slaughter, disease, collective madness, the obfuscation and contamination of the Mind. For no human heart is capable of bearing so much pain. The whole, complex human psyche has evolved to prevent Man from understanding what he is really seeing. To stop the truth from reaching him by wrapping it in illusion, in idle chatter. The world is a prison full of suffering, so constructed that in order to survive one must inflict pain on others. Do you hear me?” I said. But now even the cleaner, disappointed by my speech, had set about his work, so I was only talking to the Poodle.

I also have a can of pepper spray in case anyone were to attack me on the road, though it’s highly unlikely.

when one takes a careful look at the people passing in the street, one might assume that many others have the same problem too, and haven’t done what they should with their lives either.

When I heard Good News’s account of her life, I mentally began to formulate questions that start with the words “Why don’t you . . . ,” followed by a description of what—in our view—one should do in this sort of situation. My lips were on the point of producing one of these impertinent “why don’t yous” when I bit my tongue. That’s just what the color magazines do—just for a moment I’d wanted to be like them: they tell us what we’ve failed to do, where we’ve messed up, what we’ve neglected; ultimately they set us on ourselves, filling us with self-contempt. So I didn’t say a word. Other people’s life stories are not a topic for debate. One should hear them out, and reciprocate in the same coin.

I was outraged. But when the bell rang for lessons, I quickly said: “One has to tell people what to think. There’s no alternative. Otherwise someone else will do it.”

Boros’s presence reminded me what it’s like to live with someone. And how very awkward it is. How much it diverts you from your own thoughts and distracts you. How another Person starts to irritate you without actually doing anything annoying, but simply by being there. Each morning when he went off to the forest, I blessed my glorious solitude. How do people manage to spend decades living together in a small space? I wondered. How can they possibly sleep in the same bed together, breathing on and jostling each other accidentally in their sleep? I’m not saying it hasn’t happened to me too. For some time I shared my bed with a Catholic, and nothing good came of it.

“What have you done in life?” Boros suddenly asked.

For people of my age, the places that they truly loved and to which they once belonged are no longer there. The places of their childhood and youth have ceased to exist, the villages where they went on holiday, the parks with uncomfortable benches where their first loves blossomed, the cities, cafés and houses of their past. And if their outer form has been preserved, it’s all the more painful, like a shell with nothing inside it anymore. I have nowhere to return to. It’s like a state of imprisonment.

I think I can find proof for the fact that we inherit phenotypes, which flies in the face of modern genetics. I had noticed that certain acquired features make irregular appearances in subsequent generations. So three years ago I set about repeating Mendel’s experiment with sweet peas; I am now in the middle of it. I notched the petals of the flowers, through five generations in a row (two a year), and then checked to see if the seeds would produce flowers with damaged petals. I must say that the results of this experiment were looking very encouraging.

I recognized her. We had often met at Good News’s shop. Her name was Innocenta, which impressed me greatly. Beyond that I did not envy her—she had several ne’er-do-well sons who were no use at all.

taphonomy.

think in the Czech Republic it’s totally different. The people there are capable of discussing things calmly and nobody quarrels with anyone else. Even if they wanted to, they couldn’t, because their language isn’t suited to quarreling.

Saint Bernard excommunicated a swarm of Bees, whose buzzing prevented him from working. Bees also had to answer for the death of a Man from the city of Worms in the year 846. The local parliament condemned them to death by suffocation. In 1394 in France some Pigs killed and ate a child. The Sow was sentenced to hang, but her six children were spared, taking their young age into consideration. In 1639 in France, a court in Dijon sentenced a Horse for killing a Man. There have been cases not only of Murder, but also of crimes against nature. Thus in Basel in 1471 there was a lawsuit against a Hen, which laid strangely colored eggs. It was condemned to death by burning, for being in cahoots with the devil. Here I must add my own comment, that intellectual limitation and human cruelty know no bounds. The most famous trial took place in France, in 1521. It was the trial of some Rats, which had been causing a lot of destruction. They were summoned to court by the townsfolk and were appointed a public defense counsel, a quick-witted lawyer named Bartolomeo Chassenée. When his clients failed to appear at the first hearing, Chassenée petitioned for a deferment, testifying that they lived in wide dispersal, on top of which many dangers lay in wait for them on the way to the court. He even appealed to the court to provide a guarantee that Cats belonging to the plaintiffs would not do the defendants any harm on their way to the hearing. Unfortunately, the court could not provide any s...

In 1659 in Italy the owners of vineyards destroyed by Caterpillars submitted to them a written summons to court. Pieces of paper with the wording of the summons were nailed to trees in the area, so the Caterpillars might become acquainted with the indictment.

“I have been practicing Astrology for many years, and I have extensive experience. Everything is connected with everything else, and we are all caught in a net of correspondences of every kind. They should teach you that at police training college. It’s a solid, old tradition. From Swedenborg.”

In a semiconscious state for days on end, I anxiously fantasized about my sweet peas, worrying that I should be tending the sixth generation, or else the results of my research would cease to be valid and once again we would assume that we don’t inherit our life experience, that all the sciences in the world are a waste of time, and that we’re incapable of learning anything from history.

Whenever some dubious rip-off is organized, they always drag children into it from the very start.